My job frequently requires me to switch from Windows to Mac and vice versa, which means it’s easy to mix up the differences between the two platforms. For example, I keep forgetting that the “close” button doesn’t work the same way on these two platforms. On a Mac, it usually hides the window. But on PC, it gets rid of it entirely. So imagine my annoyance when I recently booted up my Windows PC and accidentally closed Firefox, which had 11 open tabs. Recovering these tabs was easy, if a bit tedious, and I discovered a few useful methods to speed up the process.
One keyboard shortcut to restore them all
The simplest and fastest way to restore your tabs is a single keyboard shortcut. On Windows, this is Ctrl-Shift-T. On a Mac, it’s Command-Shift-T. If you’ve closed or quit the browser, you can open it again and use this shortcut to restore all the tabs you had open.
Restore tabs with a few more clicks
If the shortcut doesn’t work, you can try an alternate method to restore your tabs. In Chrome (or any other Chromium browser), click the three-dots icon in the top-right corner and go to History > X Tabs > Restore Window. Under the History menu, you’ll see a sub-menu with the number of tabs you had open from your previous session. Clicking into the menu reveals the option to restore them all.
In Firefox, you can click the three horizontal lines button in the top-right corner and go to History > Restore Previous Session to restore all your tabs.
Set up your browser to restore open tabs
The simplest way to restore your tabs is to ask your browser to open previously closed tabs each time you fire it up. In Chrome (and other Chromium browsers), you can do this by pasting chrome://settings/onStartup into your address bar, pressing Enter, and selecting Continue where you left off.
Firefox uses a similar process. Open about:preferences#general in the address bar and tick on Open previous windows and tabs under the “Startup” subheading.
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